Stroke It

by Ivy Jordan

  I needed to get on with my life. This wasn’t going to end well for either of us, and I couldn’t see it continuing the way things were. Sawyer clearly didn’t want help, and I couldn’t keep trying to give it to him if he didn’t want it. I thought to the conference I’d been at this weekend; I was seeing major business success, I was making decent money, and I could find someone else.

  Never mind that it felt like hell to put those pictures down and know that I couldn’t be with him again.

  Never mind that I knew, deep down, that I cared about Sawyer, more than I wanted to admit.

  I turned on my heel and walked away. I didn’t want to hear his excuses anymore. All I wanted now was to be done and start the long, painful process of putting myself back together.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  SAWYER

  The next morning, Pete picked me up from my house so we could go to the hardware store for a few odds and ends. I didn’t like leaving my car behind, but it wasn’t any trouble, and after the hardware store Pete dropped me back off. He wanted to take the rest of the day working on projects he’d bought the materials for, and I couldn’t help him with most of it anyway. So he dropped me off with instructions to take the day off.

  I thought about whether Quinn was back in town yet. I needed to talk to her about everything that had happened with Stacy for sure; it bothered me that I hadn’t gotten the chance to do so. I felt like I’d cheated, even though I definitely hadn’t. Stacy had been gone from the house when I woke up that morning, gone without a trace, and as unnerved as I was by her sudden disappearance, I was glad for her to be gone.

  When I looked down at my phone, I saw quite a few missed calls from Quinn and frowned. She must have been trying to get in touch with me. I started to call her back, and then paused at the door when I saw something poking out from under the doormat.

  They looked like photographs. I picked up them up and dusted the small layer of dirt off them. Me, asleep in bed, with Stacy next to me in her underwear. Me, asleep with… cocaine? I thought at first that they might have been old pictures, but they weren’t. That was my current house, and I’d gotten some of those tattoos overseas.

  How the hell had this happened? Was it photoshop? I squinted at the page and thought of the drinks I’d had the night before. But they weren’t enough to even prevent me from driving home, let alone enough to make me sleep.

  Somehow, I had slept through this, if it wasn’t photoshopped. I didn’t know how, and I almost suspected that Stacy had drugged me. I put the photos down and then the question hit me: Who put the photos there?

  Stacy could have done that, but it wasn’t likely. Was it? I looked down at the photos and at her, smiling in her bra and underwear and wrinkling her nose at the camera, and finally I began to get angry. I’d let her into my house, trusted her to behave herself for one night, and this was how she repaid me. It wasn’t fair, dammit, and I needed answers.

  I opened the door to my house to see if she was back. She wasn’t, so I got in my car and started driving. Hell, I didn’t even know where to find her, especially if she didn’t want to be found. But all I could think about was what would have happened if Quinn saw those photos, and all the progress I would lose with her. She trusted me, and I couldn’t betray that trust.

  When I went to her home, her parents hadn’t seen her. In fact, they hadn’t seen her in quite some time and asked me to send her back if I ran into her.

  She’d lied about needing a place to stay. She’d lied about needing a place to stay so she could come into my house and set me up to… to what? What was her motive behind this? She’d give the photos to me, not the police—or someone else had. I drove to the place she used to work, and they hadn’t seen her in years.

  I tried a few bars to no avail, and finally, I tried George’s. She was the first thing I saw when I walked in, sitting up on a billiards table with her hair done up in a braid.

  “Stacy, I swear to fucking Christ,” I started, marching up to her.

  A bulky man in a tank top that showed off his muscles walked up to me. “He botherin’ you, Stace?”

  I sized him up and set my jaw. I could flatten this man into the floorboards without breaking a sweat. I’d taken worse down with less anger in my system.

  “No,” Stacy said. “Maybe back up a little. He’ll kick your ass.”

  The man looked slightly insulted, but he did back up. I turned back to Stacy and took the photos out of my pocket, shoving them in her direction.

  “Where the hell did these come from?” I barked.

  “Um, your house.” Stacy leaned forward, raising an eyebrow. Like she was daring me to contradict her, like she had any moral ground to stand on here.

  “What did you do? You broke in my room and set this up?”

  “Yeah, I mean, isn’t that obvious?”

  “Why did you put these at my door?” I was fighting to keep some semblance of calm, and the veins on my neck were close to bulging. My jaw was almost too tight for me to speak, my words coming through clenched and forced.

  “I didn’t put them at your door,” Stacy said. Her gaze was even, almost eerily calm.

  “Then who the hell did?”

  “Probably Quinn.” Stacy pursed her mouth like she was pondering over whether it would rain later in the day. “I mean, she was kind of upset when I showed her what you’d done.”

  “You bitch.” I threw the photos down on the table. “You did this all to fuck over my relationship?”

  “It’s not fair,” Stacy said. Her lower lip quivered and she bit down on it. “You know that? It’s not fair. We get in deep with some hard shit and you take off, and I’m alone. And I don’t have any money. My parents keep paying for all my bullshit. I never get better. And you come back all better, like nothing ever happened. I have to go to rehab or jail and I can’t ever get a job again and you did the same shit I did but you’re scot free. It’s not fair. I’ll never get better, and you deserve to know what that feels like.”

  “I never stooped to your level.” I expected to yell, but my voice only grew quiet, dangerously quiet, restrained because if I didn’t keep it down I would explode. “I did what I had to do to make it out okay. There was never anything stopping you from recovering but yourself. You think I went to a fucking vacation resort for six years? You have no fucking idea what I’ve been through to get myself back on track.”

  The insinuation that I had got off easy was enough to end the conversation. I couldn’t hear the rest of what she had to say. “The fact that you think I got off easy is enough,” I spat. “You’ll never change. You’ll never fucking change. You’re never going to get better. I hope you fucking rot.”

  “We both will, you self-centered shit,” Stacy barked back at me. “You think Quinn is going to want you after what she’s seen? You’ll end up alone like the rest of us.”

  If she were a man, I would have hit her. As it stood, I knew there was nothing else I could say that might sway her. I needed to salvage my relationship with Quinn. I needed to try and make things right. Especially if what Stacy said was true and Quinn had seen the photos. There might not be any saving it. Everything might be over, for good this time.

  I called Quinn and sat in the car in the parking lot. She didn’t answer, and so I called her again, and then a third time.

  I closed my eyes and set my fists on the steering wheel. I wanted to punch something. I wanted to go to Quinn’s house, to her office, anywhere she might be and talk to her in person. But if she wasn’t answering my calls, she didn’t want to talk to me, and I didn’t want to force her to talk to me if she didn’t want to. She would come around when she wanted to.

  But there was a chance she wouldn’t. I drove home and managed, somehow, not to hit anything in my blind rage. I stomped inside and slammed the door behind me.

  Quinn might be leaving me. I thought of all the times I’d pictured her at the kitchen table in the mornings, having her coffee on the porch. I’d been stupid enough
to think that I could deserve her, that I could overcome my past and have something so good in my life.

  Except that I had overcome my past. I’d done everything I could and more to overcome my past. I was better now. I’d convinced myself that I was beyond it all. It was Stacy, or perhaps my empathy.

  It was bullshit. It was all bullshit, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. The hours went on, and I began to get tired behind the eyes. My brain was still wide awake for some time, and I laid in bed staring at the ceiling. I didn’t know if I’d be able to go to sleep, and I was almost afraid to. I checked the locks again to make sure no one could get in. Stacy wasn’t there. No one was there but me.

  I’d be alone for a long time if Quinn had deserted me.

  Despite how alert my brain was, my body began to get too tired to stay awake. Sometimes in the SEALs, we would need to stay awake for a few days at a time, and we would take short naps during the day to keep our bodies from getting exhausted. When I drifted off to sleep, it was the SEALs that I saw.

  My old teammates behind my eyes were so alive. I couldn’t remember a time that I’d ever been part of something so important. In the SEALs, I belonged somewhere, I meant something, I stood for something that meant something. There was no gray area. It was doing your duty, and that was it. There weren’t horrible ex-girlfriends. Our pasts didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the task ahead, and everything else could wait until later. And later could be drunk or slept away into nothing.

  And as much purpose as there was, there was so much more blood. That was behind my eyes, too, every time that my body tried to sleep. Blood, screaming, sounds and smells that I never wanted to experience again. I knew what it smelled like when people died in the desert. I knew what it smelled like when we couldn’t bury them and so the sun tried to dry them out, make it easier. I knew what it looked like when new recruits didn’t duck in time, and could tell what type of grenade had exploded based on the holes in a man’s face.

  I woke up and found myself still there. I slept, and went back. I tossed over in my bed and prayed that one day, maybe, I might wake up.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  QUINN

  “So I don’t know what to do, you know? My wife won’t talk to me about it. I think she’s embarrassed, but I can’t help what my dad says. He’s always been like that, and I told her before that he was going to be a little… weird.” Mark, one of my regulars, scratched at his head. “She won’t talk to me about it.”

  I clicked my pen and sat back in my chair. I’d been taking notes every now and again because it was hard for me to listen. I’d spent countless hours in training, learning how to compartmentalize my own problems so that when I went to work, it wouldn’t be an issue to hear someone else without worrying about myself. What good was a therapist if they were too consumed by their own issues to help their patients? I knew of therapists that could barely hold their own lives together but still gave stellar advice to their patients. Preaching and practicing were entirely separate when it came to this line of work.

  But I was still in the learning process. I’d never had something majorly awful happen and then had to come to work. This was the first time I’d ever been truly shaken before heading into an appointment. Mark didn’t deserve to have a therapist that only half-listened and struggled to even empathize with him. I prided myself on my work, on my talents, and here I was unable to even focus on my patient, let alone offer anything more than cliché advice.

  And it was all because of a man, and that was the worst part. If it were a death in the family, perhaps that would be permissible. But no, I’d had a relationship problem, and here I was acting like a child in my own mind.

  I didn’t know what to do about it. If I’d had the chance to solve things with him, perhaps this wouldn’t feel so awful. But as it was, I hadn’t had that chance. I’d been left to draw my own conclusions, and while I’d done my best to be fair to him, I couldn’t mentally walk myself back from the choice I’d made to leave him.

  He didn’t even know I’d left. I knew he was calling me; my phone went off a few times during the day, and I couldn’t bring myself to answer. If I answered, I would have to restart the whole process again. As awful and selfish as it was, it was easiest to assume I was right and keep barreling forward. After work, maybe I would go out for drinks with Babs. Or stay in and have drinks with Babs.

  More likely, I would throw myself into my work and never look up again. Looking up had proven to be dangerous. I said goodbye to Mark when it was time for him to leave and packed up my own things to go. Instead of going home, though, I went to Babs’s house. She sent me a text asking if I wanted to come over and talk, and I didn’t know if she’d caught wind of my troubles—everything had gone down only the day before—but I needed to tell someone about this.

  I couldn’t be my own therapist. Jesus, maybe I needed my own therapist. I pulled up to Babs’s house and parked precariously towards the end of the driveway. She had a huge assortment of plants piled up on the driveway, and I imagined she was probably watering them all at once with the hose as she was want to do. It didn’t work, and it was inefficient, but she liked to take pictures of all her houseplants on the driveway.

  I knocked on the front door, and she flung it open, smiling.

  “Quinn! Hey,” she said. “Hey, it’s good to see you. I’ve been busy.”

  “Yeah, I saw the plants in the driveway,” I said.

  “I’m trying to get some cleaning done. It’s a real mess in here.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I swear, every time I stay sober for more than a few days, I go on a cleaning spree. It’s probably for the best, though. My parents are coming to visit at the end of the week, and it smells like pot in here.”

  It did, but not so prominently as usual. “It’s not so bad,” I offered.

  “Thanks. I went out and bought a few scented candles, and I have the windows up. It’s ridiculous that it still smells at all. I haven’t smoked in a few days. Pot usually clears out pretty quick, but, I guess it’s in the furniture or some shit. I don’t know.” Babs shrugged and closed the door behind me.

  I nodded, trying to engage in this conversation. “Smoke can do that.”

  “Yeah. You okay? You look a little out of it.” Babs sat down on the couch and wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, this couch might just have to go. Can you wash sofa cushions? Sorry, sorry, I asked you a question.”

  “You can wash sofa cushions,” I said. I might as well offer some kind of advice as collateral for the emotional hand-holding I needed. “And, um, some stuff with Sawyer happened.” This felt like grave-dressing, and I didn’t like any part of that.

  Babs set her chin in her hand. “Oh? What happened? You haven’t mentioned him in a while.”

  “Yeah, I was out for a conference, and then before that we were busy,” I said. I was trying to avoid what had happened and failing miserably. “I… I got back, and Stacy called me. She said she’d met up with Sawyer and she had these, um, these pictures. Of him and her and him with cocaine and it was just…”

  “Wait, what?” Babs balked. “What do you mean him with cocaine?”

  “Him on the bed and cocaine on the table.”

  “Do you have the photos?”

  “No, I went by his house and dropped them off.” I shifted in my seat and sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know if she set it up or if he actually did cocaine or if there’s some middle truth there, but I don’t want to deal with this anymore. I just want a regular boyfriend who isn’t involved with cocaine.”

  “I understand,” Babs said, but there was something in her face that reflected she was holding back.

  “What?” I asked.

  Babs shook her head. “It’s nothing.”

  “Babs, come on.”

  “You’ll get mad!”

  “Come on!”

  Babs sighed and pulled her head up off her hand. “Fine. But it’s not my fault if you get mad.” She shook her head. “So th
is is Stacy we’re talking about, right? Stacy who has always been shady and mean and backstabbing? Who has no reason to change? And Sawyer’s never given you any reason to doubt him until now. As far as I can tell, he’s done everything and then some to get himself back on track.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not finished.” Babs tilted her head to the side. “So basically what I’m hearing is that you got this information from Stacy—who is basically like, an unreliable narrator but in real life—and you’re condemning Sawyer for it without even asking for his side of the story.”

  I balked at her bluntness. “Well, I mean, I can imagine his side of the story is that she set it up.”

  “You don’t know that.” Babs frowned at me. “You don’t know what happened. You’re just going off intel you got from a pathological liar.”

  “But even if that’s true, I just… I don’t want to deal with it,” I argued, though I could sense that my logic was crumbling in front of me.

  “That might be true,” Babs said. “But not for the reasons you think. I think that you’re scared that you and Sawyer are doing so well and you’re so scared of that commitment that you’re frankly relieved for an out.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “Is it? Because you have no reason not to get Sawyer’s side of the story. You have no reason not to talk to him about it. It’s not like you walked in while they were fucking or watched him snort a line. He could very reasonably be completely innocent.” Babs’s eyebrow was still up.

  I frowned and felt like pulling the card she always pulled on me. ‘Stop psychoanalyzing me!’

  “But if you go over there and talk to him and everything works out, then what? You’re back on the up and up. Things will be going well. And then what? You’ve not been in a relationship this strong and steady before in a really long time. I think you’re letting your fear of commitment get in the way and you’re using this incident as an excuse,” Babs said.